


picture beneath

by hardscrabble



Series: and my glance turns to a stare [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Character's Name Spelled as Viktor, Developing Friendships, Gen, Welcome to the Madness (Yuri!!! on Ice), all-nighters, good at skating; bad at everything else, rated for our boys' language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 02:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14510460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardscrabble/pseuds/hardscrabble
Summary: Yuri might be new to this friendship thing, so he might be overreacting to eight hours of radio silence, but he is getting the off-balance oh-crap feeling just like the ice falling out from under him on an element he’d had down since baby skating.Or: Yuri can throw together an exhibition skate in 14 hours, but maintaining a friendship for more than three days? Might be dicey.[Part I of a series, but each individual work can stand on its own.]





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Approximately fifty hours of his first official friendship have passed by the time Yuri Plisetsky is running what might end up being a footwork sequence with the object of said friendship, who happens to be Worlds ’14 bronze medalist Otabek Altin.

Thinking about choreography isn’t unusual, and collaborating with another skater isn’t new _per se_ , but the combination, along with everything else, feels particularly sharply focused and fizzy right now, bordering on hyperreality. Being on a Barcelona beach after 1 A.M. in mid-December wearing vinyl leggings and his new friend’s spare hoodie might have something to do with it. Altin is pacing him, minus the steps—his boots would make footwork on sand even dumber—and holding his cell phone, which is doing its best with the bass-heavy guitars in _that song_. “Something like this,” Yuri says, “crossovers and whatever, then axel into the—”

“Axel? Russian split.”

It’s the first time Altin has spoken over the track and the surf since Yuri asked—demanded? He doesn’t recall the precise wording—for him to play DJ. Not by dropping beats in a cool Spanish rock club, but rather by looping the same two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of metal with screechy vocals on _a beach in mid-December_ for a hyper fifteen-year-old staging a stylistic coup against his coaches.

Yuri skids to a stop on his right foot, and a handful of sand not nearly so satisfying as ice spray arcs and falls from the edge of his sneaker. He looks more closely at Altin, who is making consideration eyebrows: in two days and change, Yuri has cataloged and categorized each of Altin’s expressions that he’s seen; they vary minutely but importantly from each other and occur mostly on his forehead. He doesn’t waste his breath on unnecessary words or muscle movements for anything between his nose and chin. That much is clear from his skating. Which should have gotten him on the podium.

 _Russian split,_ he remembers. “Replay?” Yuri asks. “From the last jump?”

He realizes how useless this request is just as Altin says, “From one-thirteen,” and taps his screen.

“You been _counting_?”

“Notes,” Altin says, as if this isn’t even weirder, and then, “Listen—”

Yuri listens. The descending riffs tumble and he tracks what exists of the choreography, the steps and hops and crossovers, then envisions the leadup to the jump and the midair deep split, which Lilia disdains as ungraceful but it’s _fun_. Moreover, it’s right. “You’re right,” he says, just as Altin pauses the track to say, “The drama leadup’s wrong.”

“The what?”

“This.” He un-pauses. The riffs are climbing now. “Gonna bump the tempo on the whole section. Too heavy otherwise.”

“You can do that?”

“Better than I can kill a drama leadup for the ice tiger’s rockstar moment.”

He blinks. He is fairly certain Altin has just made a joke at his expense.

Altin doesn’t seem to have noticed. He’s doing thoughtful eyebrows now: “Cutting from 30 to 43 like we said, camel spin to half-Biellmann here—” The phone shrieks suddenly, then cuts back into the guitar. He keeps talking over it. “Jacket off, but 46 to 57 is gone, then keep 57 to one-oh-two but cut to one-thirteen right at the beginning of the steps through the axel, if you insist—”

“No. Russian split,” Yuri says. “The energy’s better.”

“Good man. Then rockstar moment at one-thirty-two, when you lose the sunglasses.” Altin is thumbing between apps on his phone, which glows with enough bluish-white light to show the faint crease between his eyebrows. “So bump the tempo, ah, what’s _Appasionato_ ’s?”

“Infinity.”

He looks up from his phone, the eyebrow crease much deeper. Nearly anger eyebrows, and Yuri catches himself from taking a step backward. “So that’s my upper limit.” He says it hard and flat, flatter than usual, as if Yuri is screwing around with something very serious to him.

 _Oh._ Yuri is, in fact, screwing around with something very serious to Altin, and he shakes himself. A _real_ DJ, who is _his friend,_ and also deeply invested in music, is tweaking a song for him for a skate happening in _eleven hours_ , and it is very cold on this fucking beach. “No, sorry—I’m, uh—Rockstar moment at one-thirty-two, from—you said one-thirteen for the beginning of the steps?”

“One-thirteen. Replay?”

“No—”

Bird’s-eye view: choreo, crossovers, split, his own momentum nearly to the boards, and he’s counting because despite knowing nothing about music he can at least remember how long a second is, _thanks, Lilia_. “Fifteen seconds. Glasses go fifteen seconds after I land the jump. If I don’t fuck up.” Altin is still staring at him, but the eyebrow crease is now asymmetrical, one of his eyebrows barely quirked. “What? I won’t fuck up; have you _seen_ me lately?”

“What did you just do?”

“What?”

“How did you figure that? Fifteen—”

“Watched the skate, duh.” Yuri remembers he is being gracious to Altin, who is being _extremely_ gracious to him, and fumbles for words. “Like, reviewed the choreo, where I’ll be on the ice when, coverage…”

Altin stares at him another second, then makes a sort of half-frown impressed face (sometimes his mouth does move in expressions; usually just one corner at a time) and drops his gaze back to his phone. “So condense that nineteen-second bit to—no, wait, the rest of it, too, why mess with good momentum—anyway, if I speed up that nineteen-second bit so it’s fifteen long, then that gives us…” He glares at the little screen, but in a thinking way, not an angry one. “I need a laptop. No, wait, mine’s in my bag. I need an outlet.”

“I need a rink,” Yuri says. “And warm. And probably coffee.”

“Bet medalists have privileges.” Altin sounds—not bitter, not even the least bit, and Yuri marvels once again at this _competitive skater’s_ complete okayness with not _being_ a medalist. He sounds purely conspiratorial.

Yuri smiles back. “Bet. Coffee on me.” It might be his first real smile, not from manic energy or press making-nice or whatever, since—he doesn’t know and it doesn’t matter. He smiles.

***

Their cab drops Yuri and Altin at the convention center with coffees from a petrol-station convenience store—Yuri normally has standards, but some nights just call for one-euro coffee with nine packets of sugar—and the night security guard at the main entrance grins at the two of them. “Events are over, boys,” she says in English.

“Performances aren’t, though,” says Yuri, and shit, he sounds cranky. He clears his throat and tries to smile back at the guard. “All right if I get in some practice? Alti—Otabek is helping me out.”

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” Her grin widens even more, now directed just at Yuri. “I know it is for _you_. My niece is one of your Angels. I’d ask for an autograph, but those photos from Moscow—”

“Favor for a favor,” says Yuri, surprising himself, but not much. It’s cold out. The rink will be warmer.

By the grace of Altin, who is some kind of motorcycling DJing figure-skating Boy Scout with a Moleskine tear-out page and ballpoint pen ready to go, Yuri scribbles in English—after the guard, Lia, confirms her niece is fluent—“Nerea: RAWR. Your aunt is cool,” signs his name, and doodles a suggestion of a cat face, ears and whiskers and a mouth shaped like a 3. He is feeling deeply grateful and deeply generous, and thanks Lia in a complete sentence as she holds one door for him and Altin.

Medalists _do_ have privileges, or at least those with rabid preteen fans do.

***

Inside, Yuri skates a full lap before calling to Altin—huddled over his laptop with headphones the size of Potya and the concentration eyebrows, which are only subtly different from default eyebrows—“Oi, Otabek, don’t ever skate in vinyl!”

“Noted,” replies Altin, without looking up from the screen. He steadies the laptop with one hand and digs in his backpack with the other, retrieving the multiple bottles of water he’d bought at the petrol station. Boy Scout or recreational survivalist. Possibly both.

Yuri huffs out of habit—the idea of Altin in PVC club-kid wear just doesn’t quite work, anyway—and goes to change; he’s got joggers and a ratty stretched-out T-shirt in his assigned locker, because Yakov insists. (This insistence on spare workout clothes is somehow related to an incident involving Viktor’s senior debut and a Speedo, but Yakov clams up whenever Yuri badgers him about it.) He’s careful as he peels off the gloves and the leggings, and he makes sure that the satiny jacket is folded along its seams to avoid wrinkles. The tank, with its stupid beautiful useless cutouts, is less precious: he hangs it by the shoulder straps on the same hook as the so-bad-it’s-good crucifix chain.  He leaves his dance belt on, because he’s not a moron, and drags on the joggers and shirt. Skates back on, last super-sweet swallow of coffee, guards off, and he’s back out on the ice.

By 3:30, Yuri has skated the program (lazily—singles and doubles only, because the last thing he wants to do is _actually_ not skate in the exhibition _now_ , considering that scene in Barceloneta, if he were to screw up his legs tonight) four times. Two of those are to Altin’s edited version of the track, which is perfect. Yuri cools down with a couple laps while Altin writes out notes to give to the gala exhibition crew. “With the song,” Yuri calls across the rink, “is copyright a—I don’t know how shit works, Yakov usually just yells at everything—”

“They’re still unsigned,” Altin calls back. “No labels, no lawyers.” Yuri stops by the boards nearest Altin for a moment and stretches his arms as Altin continues speaking at a normal volume. “You’re doing them a favor. They’re psyched you picked it.”

He stops mid-stretch. “They _know_?”

Altin half-smiles. “Friend of a friend did some session work with them, passed the track around, asked if we—DJs, Europe and Asia—could put it in sets, get it heard. A gold medalist at the GPF gala? That’s _exposure_. I DMed their bassist from the booth at Poblenou—she took an hour to stop all-capsing at me.”

In ten years on and around rinks, Yuri has never considered this aspect of his own performances. On the ice, music just _happens_ , and he skates to it. He _likes_ music; he listens to stuff more or less constantly when he’s not training or sleeping, but the idea of a musician being personally excited that _he specifically_ likes their work—“Huh,” is all he can say.

“DJ privileges.” Altin picks up one of the four water bottles next to him on the bench and raises his eyebrows. Yuri nods and reaches for it; Altin gets up to hand it over. “Now. Lights,” he says. “Ideas?”

“Red and a spot,” Yuri says immediately. He downs half the water and sets off for one more lap.

“A spot. Really.”

“Piss off!”

“Blue too, though.”

“But—”

Altin calls over him, “Contrast. Police lights, kind of. Plus, off the clubbing outfit, it’ll look cool. Sharp switches. Not fades, no purples—”

“ _Absolutely_ no purples.” JJ will have that market cornered. “But ending on red,” he insists at a yell, rounding the opposite end of the rink.

“Rockstar moment blue,” Altin yells back. “Swap to red after the second glove. No—your last jump til the end, that in blue, then red _right_ as you hit the ice—”

He sees it in his head and feels his grin go feral. “ _Yes_.”

“Red gel on the spot, too,” adds Altin as Yuri steps off the ice and into a stretch. “Really saturate it.”

“Perfect.”

Yuri changes into sneakers, puts his skates away, and drinks another bottle of water before he checks his phone. It’s nearly 4, he has twenty-three drunk texts from Mila, and Altin is as wired as he is, still tapping at his laptop and scribbling notes in that Moleskine, bouncing one leg at high speed. “Wanna head back?”

“This is my _shit_ ,” says Altin, but he closes the laptop and gets up, grabs his bag, and starts packing up. “Tweaking music and planning lights—clubs have these ridiculous setups, you don’t even know how much fun the effects guys are having, especially at electro shows—”

“I’ll find out.” This is the most excited Altin has ever sounded.

“In _three years_.”

“Two. And three months, geezer. _If_ they check.” Yuri slugs more water. “You were saying, some geek shit about club lighting at electro shows, although that was definitely a rock club—”

“Says the Russian _Punk_ skating to practically speed metal.”

Yuri slaps a hand to his own chest, faking affront. “Are you suggesting this is _off brand_ for me?”

“Never.”

“Good, because—”

“You know fuckall about music genres, though.”

“Excuse _me—_ it’s not like I picked my nicknames, O Hero of Kazakhstan. It’s not like we choose our image.” Yuri remembers Nikiforov saying something similar in Hasetsu, an eon and seven months ago. “Otherwise that fairy shit—”

“‘The Russian Cat-demon’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it,” Altin interrupts, deadpan.

“Otabek, they will never find your body.”

“They will,” he says serenely. “I’m the one with the mp3.”

Yuri whacks him on the shoulder on general principle as they head to the hotel. It’s freezing, but Yuri is too high on rebellion—on _beautifully choreographed_ rebellion—to give a shit, so he’s carrying Altin’s borrowed hoodie in one hand and the last water bottle in the other. “That’s only going to save you for another, what, ten hours, _hero_.”

“JJ will protect me.”

The sudden reminder that other people exist is so startling that Yuri’s brain sort of whites out for a second. “JJ will meet me in _hell_ —”

A hand closes around his arm. The hand is very warm and attached to Altin, who half-drags, half-escorts him through an intersection. It’s so late it’s early, but Barcelona traffic doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. “No aneurysms. You skate in ten hours. During which I promise I will not call you any assorted press-granted nicknames.”

“Because you’ll be sleeping like the sane solemn hero of Kaz—”

“Like _you’re_ going to sleep. Come on.”

“Are you _enabling_ me? Aren’t you the responsible one?”

“You haven’t seen my family’s cats yet.”

Yuri is so very pleased with his friend he might catch himself trying to make more.

***

“— _a surprise guest performance by Katsuki Yuuri’s coach, Viktor Nikiforov!_ ”

Altin murmurs, “I guess our surprises overlapped,” which is so overwhelmingly understated that Yuri wants to punch him or cry or—

Inspiration strikes like lightning. He feels as if he’s hit his funny bone and it’s zapped up his entire spinal cord. Maybe geniuses feel like this all the time. “Otabek! My friend!”

“What—”

“ _You be in it too!_ ”

Altin does not immediately say anything, possibly because he is in full possession of his senses and the knowledge that he is wearing biker boots. The world blurs and Yuri is holding a fistful of Altin’s white t-shirt in his fist, right up near the collar, and he has said some words that apparently did their job, because Altin grins suddenly—actually grins, showing teeth—and says, “Only one answer. Wait, three: what, where, when?”

Bird’s-eye view: spotlight on him, lights low at the edges of the rink, _except for the rockstar moment with the traveling spot_. “Right side, middle. You go on once the spotlight’s on me—”

“Bet you say that a lot.”

“ _No bet,_ ” Yuri snaps, and he feels blood singing in his eardrums, he is _brilliant_. “Don’t slip or do anything moronic. Rockstar moment.”

Altin looks up, eyes tracking empty space from left to right, left to right—“Okay,” he says. “What am I doing?”

“Get my gloves for me. One at a time, with the hits—”

“Chords, and one day I will teach you about music words.”

“Then _shoot me_.”

Eyebrow crease. “It’s not a terribly serious offense.”

“ _Idiot!_ ” Yuri says, grinning so broadly his face hurts. “The end, the fall, higher light from the last jump, finger pistol. Like Poblenou.” He is pretty sure he will be able to speak sentences again sometime, but right now Altin is grinning back, even wider than before, and grammar has never been less relevant.

“Let’s go, cat-demon.”

In the last second before Yuri takes off for the center of the rink, they both say “ _Davai_!” and flash thumbs-ups in such perfect unison that Yuri would think it was fucking creepy if it weren’t so awesome.

***

Yuri rides the performance high through Lilia’s sobbing breakdown about the lost meaning of art, the demise of fashion in the twenty-first century, the waste of beauty on the young, and possibly eternal damnation. It carries him through the majority of a banquet not nearly so heavily champagned as Sochi’s, during which he completely forgets to pretend to hate the Katsudon and Nikiforov.

Katsuki is just so earnestly congratulatory about the energy and mood of the exhibition skate, how Yuri looked like he was _enjoying_ himself so much, that Yuri can only mutter, “Yeah, it was fun,” without embarrassing himself by hugging the sap or something. Nikiforov compliments his choreography (seven-months-ago Yuri screams _suck it, old man_ ). Then he cracks that everyone attending this stupid banquet probably wishes they had been Otabek Altin for the opportunity to shoot the kitten (the Katsudon whacks him on the shoulder for it, with a scandalized “ _Viktor!_ ”), and _that_ is what makes Yuri look around for Altin.

He hates being short. Skaters aren’t a tall crowd, generally, aside from the freaks like Nikiforov and the irrationally cheerful Czech one with the robot free skate, but 163 centimeters is _insufficient_ , especially when all the women in the room are wearing heels and suits all look the same and the only way to tell men apart at a glance is by hair color. Yakov and Lilia (when not breaking him) keep threatening him with his impending growth spurt, but Yuri knows his father barely hit 168 (he knows little else, but he knows that) while his mother’s legginess was some kind of genetic hiccup—his grandpa Kolya was 170 before his back problems started, and his grandma, the _tallest_ in her own family, had been several centimeters shorter. He is doomed to a lifetime of indignities, like speaking to other skaters to ask where _other_ other skaters are, or standing on his toes in his dress shoes, which is going to wear creases into the leather, or—

Yuri feels like he’s just flubbed a no-brainer jump as he realizes he hasn’t spoken to Altin since the end of the exhibition, when Altin checked his phone, muttered something, and was suddenly gone. Lilia had just as suddenly appeared, so tight-lipped it almost looked like she’d skipped the gala for her fourth facelift, to frog-march him back to her suite and observe her meltdown, which had certainly been distracting, but not _that_ distracting, and it’s been hours. Altin’s not active on social media, but they’d exchanged regular text messages right up to the free skate. Yuri might be new to this friendship thing, so he might be overreacting to eight hours of radio silence, but he is getting the off-balance oh-crap feeling just like the ice falling out from under him on an element he’d had down since baby skating…

A suited thundercloud with _vastly_ displeased eyebrows is talking to JJ and Isabella near the entrance. More accurately, Altin is being talked to by JJ, who has somehow managed to find a suit involving glitter, while Isabella (high-necked royal purple satin gown, somehow unwrinkled—she might be a witch, and Yuri suddenly imagines a faceoff between her and Lilia) looks at her fiancé adoringly and Altin… glances over his shoulder at the entryway, apparently calculating whether he can run for it while JJ is still self-obsessing. Which gives him the rest of the decade, but Altin seems to be considering something much shorter-term.

Yuri mentally scrambles up from the ice and sets off at a determined wander. He nods to those who greet him, is grabbed around the neck for a Phichit selfie for which he actually throws a peace sign, smiles at Sara Crispino because honestly, her brother isn’t her fault, and pokes Mila until she stops talking to the American ladies singles skater she spent the previous night drunk-texting him about just so he can advise her to get some sleep, _baba_. Between each interaction, he checks the entrance. Isabella sometimes throws in a word, and he sees Altin nod once and shrug twice—and then Altin glances around, realizes Yuri is ten feet distant, and loses expression so absolutely it’s like someone took an eraser to his personality.

“Oi, Otabek,” says Yuri, because this seems dependable. JJ and Isabella turn.

“Oh, it’s the scary kitten,” Isabella mutters. More loudly, “Are you going to yell at me again?”

“Your dress is great,” Yuri replies, which is not _no_. “JJ. Til Worlds, yeah?”

“Are you leaving _right_ now?” JJ almost pouts. “Your coach is that much of a babysitter?”

Yuri physically jerks with the urge to get in his face and then sighs and makes himself smile, because he wants to talk to Altin and yelling at the Canadian Crap King would just give him a chance to sneak off—he is actually _sidling_ now, by centimeters, _away from Yuri_. “He’s looking after my trainer, actually,” he says. “I kind of—I mean, I redid my exhibition program. Music, outfit. Kind of last-minute. She didn’t take it very well.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Isabella says flatly. “It was fucking cool.”

He is unprepared for this. “Wha—I, um, thank you.” Yuri blinks. “Thanks.” He throws a look at Altin, partially checking to see if he’s turned tail and ran and partially _please help me navigate this interaction_. Altin has stopped sidling and his face shows a hint of something—curiosity? “Otabek helped a ton,” Yuri continues.

“That glove thing!” JJ says, as quietly as JJ ever is: somewhere between a bullhorn and actual dynamite. “ _So_ cool!”

Very quickly, almost too quickly, Altin says, “Music and lights. Geek stuff.” He cuts his eyes at Yuri, then resumes his thousand-yard stare in JJ’s general direction. “The choreography was Yuri.”

“You helped there, too! And the gloves were improv.”

“That was _your_ choreography?” demands JJ.

“Mine and Otabek’s,” Yuri replies. Why won’t Altin _look_ at him?

“I am going to have a serious talk with my coaches about this,” JJ continues, oblivious to Yuri and to Altin refusing to look at Yuri. “They give me, like, half a percent input—”

“Honey, you can call them your parents here,” Isabella says in an undertone.

“Anyway,” Altin says suddenly, louder. “It was a late night and I’m—done in. Isabella, a pleasure. JJ.”

He _turns to leave_ and Yuri’s mouth spits out “Otabek—” and then does him one worse and twists the next word into a _question_ : “wait?”

Altin turns smoothly and his face is just as smooth. He could be stone. He doesn’t look at Yuri but says, “Sure,” as if he is not being the weirdest pod person in the actual universe.

“It _was_ a long night,” Yuri says quickly to JJ and Isabella, who he notices now _are_ watching. Could they not just be in their own weird JJ-verse— “JJ, Isabella, good night, enjoy the—”

“Sweet dreams!” JJ nearly sings.

Altin flinches. It looks like a one-eyed squint, but it’s as much of a flinch as Yuri’s seen from him.

Isabella grasps JJ’s upper arm tightly enough to wrinkle the fabric and says, “’Night, both of you. Yuri Plisetsky, happy choreography debut.” She then actually _steers_ JJ in a one-eighty and marches him off toward some pairs skaters who presumably haven’t yet heard the good news of JJ Leroy. Yuri is so astounded by this biddability that he forgets for a full second to make sure Altin hasn’t teleported away with the desire to be nowhere near Yuri, which reminds him that this is _so weird and not cool_ and he spins on his heel.

Altin is there, looking resolutely at Yuri’s left ear. “Let’s go,” he says, and spins on _his_ heel and walks right out of the banquet hall.

Yuri blinks and follows, feeling like they’re suddenly back in the alley with the crowd of Angels where he doesn’t quite recognize this person in front of him but feels like he should. He doesn’t speak until they’re well out of earshot of the hall, in the main lobby of the official hotel by the elevator bank, and even then, he is so disoriented he asks the stupidest question on the actual planet.

“What’s up?”

It’s stupid because there are so many ways out of answering it, which Yuri himself has collated into mental lists hundreds of items long, from “nothing” to “the Northern fucking Lights, you fucking flake.” Also because Yuri knows what’s up—Altin wants to avoid him but Yuri cornered him; it’s very simple—but just doesn’t know why, but “why’s up” isn’t a question unless you’re two or some kind of philosopher. But “You’re trying to ignore me and being weird and I thought we were friends and I don’t know if I did something wrong so could you please tell me what happened or what I did” is too many words to say out loud in a damn lobby.

Furthermore, it’s stupid because Altin _doesn’t_ answer.

The farthest elevator dings and opens and Yuri doesn’t remember which of them called it but they both get on, and when the doors close, Altin jerks his chin up and squares his shoulders, facing the door like it’s a campaign speech or an execution and says, “We do need to talk.”

The sickening twist-drop of his gut is _also_ stupid, because _of course_ they need to talk, and Yuri nearly snaps as much at him before he gets a good look at the guy. The stoicism has seeped out of him, despite the set of his shoulders under his blazer; he looks exhausted instead, sad and worried and tired and—scared?

Whatever kind of hairball he’s choking on, he’d better cough it up.

Also, the elevator isn’t moving. This is because the button panel is dark. “How many figure skaters does it take to figure out how to work an elevator,” Yuri mutters to the universe at large, and presses the button for the eleventh floor. Then pauses. “Wait, which—”

“Eleven too.”

“So when I passed out at—what was it, five? While you were looking for your sister’s pictures of the pearl kitten—”

“Inzhu,” Altin says, and Yuri looks at him sidelong: he’s smiling, the tiniest bit. “She’s huge now. It was five-oh-seven. When I realized you were asleep, I mean.”

Yuri glances over. “How huge?”

“What—oh. Twenty pounds. We think her mom was a Siberian. Mystery dad.”

It doesn’t seem like the moment to mention that this sounds a great deal like a certain recent GPF gold medalist with whom Altin is presently in an elevator. “I woke up with a blanket,” he says instead, and Altin’s smile vanishes.

On consideration, it may not be the moment for this topic, either.

“It’s mid-December,” Altin says. “Figured you’d want it.”

That’s a very Altin way to not explain how Yuri had ended up wrapped _in_ the blanket—

“Kind of made a burrito. With the quilt.”

Yuri blinks. This image—

“Like we do with Inzhu to trim her claws now.”

He hears a laugh, sharp and spluttery with surprise, and realizes it’s his own. “Otabek, if you so much as _breathe_ that comparison to _anyone_ —”

Altin has the grace to look confused. “Why would I?”

 _Why wouldn’t you_? Yuri shrugs. The elevator hits the eleventh floor and they both step out.

“So after I passed out, you didn’t have to, like, tramp through half the hotel,” he says, finally finishing his sentence. “That’s good. I’d wondered.”

They come to some door and Altin stops. “This is me. You—”

“ _You_ ,” Yuri interrupts, “said we need to talk. And—” Fuck it. “You’re being weird and I thought we were friends and I don’t know if I did something wrong so could you please tell me what happened or what I did?”

Empty hotel _hallways_ are apparently okay for this, just not lobbies.

Altin looks up at the ceiling, and says, with the most emotion Yuri has yet seen from him in all eighty-something hours they’ve been friends, “Fuck.” He looks back at Yuri. “Look, just—Come in.”

“You’re still being weird,” Yuri says, suspicious.

“ _Please_ come in,” says Altin, equal parts aggrieved and formal, like a passive-aggressive butler, “so that I can talk to you without making an ass of myself in a public space.”

Yuri really, really wants to point out that that’s exactly what he’s been doing, but on pretend-stealth mode as if Yuri wouldn’t notice, but figures that this is not the kind of thing you say to people who are your friends, and finally says, “Yeah, okay.”

Altin’s room is the same as Yuri’s, just neater, with a slightly different abstract painting over the bed. Altin shuts the door behind himself and puts his hands in his hair, looking—flustered?

A moment passes, and another moment, before Yuri leans against the dresser, folds his arms over his chest, and says, “I think you were planning on talking to me and making an ass of yourself in a private space, in case you forgot.”

This time it’s Altin’s turn to choke on a laugh, and he shoves his hands in his pockets. “Okay. Fair. Okay. I—look, how much have you been… online? Today?”

 _What_? “Why?” he says, cautiously.

“Karim—my coach—found this…” Altin sighs heavily. “Stuff. Online. About—you and me.”

Yuri does not understand the problem.

“There _should_ be,” he says. “We kicked ass.”

“I kidnapped,” Altin begins, “the Russian Fairy, on a motorcycle, and three days later, I pulled his left glove off his hand, with my _teeth_ , on live television, with close-ups.”

Yuri is feeling himself develop his own consternation eyebrows. “Are they forgetting the part where it was awesome? Did your coach miss that it was awesome?”

“With my _teeth_ ,” Altin repeats, sounding vaguely hysterical. Abruptly he squeezes his eyes shut, opens them, and strides to sit on the bed. He props his elbows on his knees and buries his face in his hands. “You’re _fifteen_.”

Dawn breaks with a crystalline _snap_ as Yuri’s worldview finally reconfigures to match, or at least approximate, Altin’s. “Oh,” he says.

“Yes, _oh_ ,” and if it were anyone but Otabek, Yuri would say he said it mockingly, but he just sounds—miserable, and suddenly he’s streaming words like someone’s turned on a faucet. “There’s these—I mean—they think we’re _together_ , and they’re so _into it_ , unless they’re not, and then they’re _so into not being into it_ , my inbox notifications _blanked out_ , my email address isn’t even _public_ —”

Yuri laughs without thinking and slaps a hand over his mouth as Altin jerks his head up with a full-on glare. “Sorry! Sorry, no, I thought—”

“What did you think?” Altin says, very quietly.

Quietly and _coldly_. It shoots something just as cold into the pit of Yuri’s stomach. He looks at Altin, whose glare has shifted to something disinterested, distant, as far away and unapproachable as the guy Yuri had cussed at within seconds of first hearing his name, three days—and change—ago.

Honesty, he decides, is probably the best policy, simply because he is too scared (it’s okay to admit that in his head) to say anything else. “I thought I fucked up,” he says. “That I pushed you too much or pushed you around too much, I mean— _JJ_ was on that podium, not you, and you should have been doing your own exhibition, not helping me with _mine_ , but I tailed you to Poblenou and didn’t leave you alone but you seemed like you were okay with it, like, it seemed like you were—having a good—time? Like hanging out was okay?” His mouth is running unfiltered now, complete with uptalking and run-ons and nothing like grammar or poise or coolness; he is staring at the corner of the window, angled away from Altin, who—he realizes—has a good number of reasons to sincerely dislike him now. “And then stuff went nuts after the gala and Lilia exploded and it took half a century to calm her down and I figured you’d had time to figure out how—what a—what a little jerk I am, this little punk jackass bossing you around—and I figured you were being so weird at the banquet because I was being too dense to pick up on—”

He stops at a choking-like sound from Altin and looks back at him.

Altin’s shoulders are shaking, and he’s pressing his mouth shut in the way people do when they’re failing to hide that they’re laughing, and suddenly he lets out a strangled-sounding giggle.

“What the fuck,” says Yuri, because what the fuck.

“What the fuck,” repeats Altin breathlessly, and starts _roaring_ with laughter.

Yuri allows that for ten seconds—he counts—before he kicks Altin in the shin. Gently. “No, I mean _what the fuck_?”

Altin is wiping literal honest-to-God tears from his eyes and making this weak wheezing noise multiple octaves higher than anything Yuri has ever heard out of him. “The—the—Karim gave me this lecture about—” He heaves out a breath and draws in another, holds it, lets it out slowly, inhales again. “About leading you astray, about _corrupting_ you, and there’s these—creatures on the Internet threatening duels for your honor as a teenager, and _I_ thought—”

He stops, just when this is finally getting interesting. Idiots being idiots on the Internet hasn’t been news since Yuri’s junior debut. “You thought _what_ ,” Yuri demands.

“I thought you might— _like_ me, and that I’d—I mean, you’re fifteen! _Extremely_ fifteen! Peak fifteen.”

This seems a bit much. “Fuck off, I’m sixteen in March. You thought you—”

“Would have to let you down gently.”

More pieces fall into place. “Wait, people think—” His brain feels like a blizzard has been through, but one thing sticks out from the snow: “During _competition?_ ”

Altin explodes into gales of laughter, folding over himself at the waist. He isn’t even making an effort to wipe the laughing tears off his beet-red face, and it is making Yuri’s stomach hurt in sympathy to even look at him. “God, Otabek, what now?”

“Your—fuck, I’m dying, my gravestone shall read CAUSE OF DEATH: THE ICE TIGER’S FACE, and it’ll even be true—fuck, ‘ _during competition?’_ The _scandal_ —”

Yuri is nearly certain this conversation is nearly out of useful information, and Altin suddenly flops backward on the bed and stares at the ceiling, intentionally widening his eyes. Tears stream down his temples into his ears. “I haven’t—my _abs_ —Yuri, your face. The _timing_ is what got you.”

“Of course it did,” Yuri says, although he realizes he’s starting to grin, forget actually understanding the joke, because Altin is just that amused and it’s infectious. Altin doesn’t have hysterics eyebrows; it’s his whole face. “They should know better. Winning first. All else a distant second. Except cats. Cats are actually second. Everything else a distant third.”

“Winning and _cats_ —”

“Would you please,” Yuri interrupts, before he loses Altin to the laughter vortex again, “ _please_ explain why this is so funny?”

Altin props himself up on his elbows, shaking his head as if marveling. “All this shit and Russian Punk Yuri Plisetsky is like, _no_ , dating an age-inappropriate DJ I’ve known three days is _not_ on the schedule, medals please—” He starts giggling again.

 _Dating_. Wonders will never cease. Then it catches Yuri—“But you honestly _believed_ this shit? That I—” He nearly chokes on the words, and suddenly realizes precisely how embarrassing this should be, but he can’t make himself care, because it _is_ hilarious. “You believed I was _pursuing_ you?”

“You tailed me to an eighteen-plus rock club in a city where you speak three words of the language,” Altin says, his longest coherent sentence in the last ten minutes. Yuri concedes this point. “And I took your glove off with my teeth.”

“That was _performing!_ ”

“It was improvised, you had no warning, you didn’t even _blink_ —”

“Of course I didn’t, I had a fucking program to skate!” Yuri replays the memory: he’d thrown one hand somewhat too close to Altin’s face for the same right-glove trick to work, but Altin hadn’t hesitated, and sure, his mouth had been on Yuri’s palm through a layer of leather for a slice of a second and that was—okay, now that he’s _thinking_ about it, that’s something to think about more, but later, much later, and oh, good, Altin’s laid flat-out and bawling with laughter. Again.

“ _A fucking program to skate_ ,” Altin echoes weakly, and loses all coherence.

Yuri is struck by a very weird possibility. It seems only mildly probable, considering everything that his _friend_ has done and said in the past eighty-few hours in general and in the past two in particular, but now, while stone-sober super-cool only-emotes-with-eyebrows Otabek Altin clutches his own stomach and nearly falls off his own stupid bed, Yuri reviews the story of Barcelona as it might appear externally.

Bird’s-eye view: a distant yet clear narrative involving famous strangers. The Hero of Kazakhstan picks up the Russian Fairy (ugh), on a motorcycle, and takes him to a castle in a garden, where he tells him he had the eyes of a soldier at the age of _ten_  and asks if they’re friends now. The Russian Fairy shakes his hand and they spend two hours in a tea shop before the entire GPF men’s singles crew sans JJ joins them, and they scoot off to go shopping once JJ appears, because he’s fucking JJ. After _beating the Hero of Kazakhstan_ in his first GPF as a senior skater, the Russian Fairy has the Hero appear in his exhibition program and—do the glove thing. And the glove thing _happens_ so fluidly. Although, again, putting away for future consideration.

Altin rolls off his bed with a thud, apparently intentionally, and lies on his stomach. He is quieter, but still giggling intermittently. Yuri notes again that Otabek Altin _giggles_ , before he kicks the sole of his left shoe.

“Oi. Otabek.”

As if laughing for ten minutes straight is harder on his body than a free skate, Altin groans as he rolls onto his back to look at Yuri. He raises his eyebrows, prompting Yuri to continue.

“Having established that—that—isn’t on _my_ schedule,” Yuri says, and Altin wheezes once but stops when Yuri glares, “it seems reasonable to clarify whether it’s on yours.”

Altin does his thoughtful eyebrows. He is silent for a moment, and another moment, and Yuri is beginning to actually worry when Altin says, “To be honest, I’m surprised enough…” He sounds sort of vague, which might be the oxygen deprivation from laughing for _that_ long. “It’s surprising enough that you were okay with being friends with this weirdo on a motorcycle who spirits you off to the terrace of Park Güell and spews his life story.”

For a moment, Yuri marvels at the similarity here: they are both fully aware of how weird this friendship’s origin story is, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Then he realizes that Altin has not actually answered the question.

Does he want Altin to answer the question?

He kicks his shoe again. “The motorcycle is cool, fucker.  _Do_ you—”

“No,” Altin says, very finally. Then he looks back at Yuri, his gaze having drifted to the bed’s dust ruffle. “No. You’re my friend. We’re friends. Even if—” His eyes flutter shut, and he says, as if negotiating the balance of an enormous weight, “If—that stuff _were_ on your schedule, ethically, I’d much rather be your friend first. For significantly more than...” He opens his eyes and checks his watch. “Eighty-six hours.”

“Thank _fuck_ ,” says Yuri, letting his head fall back to stare at the ceiling. He’s not sure if he’s thanking Altin for not—well, for _not_ , or thanking the universe for letting him know there is another human capable of counting friendships in hours. Possibly both. Both are worthy of gratitude.

He lets his eyes fall closed, face still tilted skyward. Altin gets up, it sounds like, and brushes himself off, and then steps toward Yuri.

Yuri doesn't move until Altin toes him in the shin—not really a kick; he doesn’t think Altin is the kicking type. “What about _you_ , though.”

Yuri looks down his nose—well, across his nose, but this is the only angle at which he can feel like he’s looking down his nose at anyone—at Altin, who is in the process of taking off his suit jacket. His tie is cool. Same blue and yellow as the Kazakhstan flag, plus some black, in a small-scale geometric pattern that doesn’t look like floor tile or anything stupid. Yuri realizes that he is very, very tired, the entirety of GPF catching up at once like a ton of bricks, which is making him analyze tie patterns. He tips his chin back down and says, “What about me?”

Altin is not making eye contact again, but that is probably because he’s heading to the closet to hang up his suit jacket on an actual hanger like the upstanding hero—oh, Yuri is going to make himself sick one day—that he is. As he does so, he says, carefully, “If it were on your schedule, having been friends for rather more than three and a half days.”

“Yeah,” Yuri says without thinking. He hears himself, and he hears Altin trip on a perfectly flat carpet, and he considers. Well, it’s true.

He waits until Altin’s hung up the jacket without injury and is facing him properly from across the room. “What?” he says. “Otabek, I’m fifteen. I’m not _blind_.”

When Altin collapses laughing this time, Yuri does, too.

**Author's Note:**

> the youtube play counts for WTTM jumped by dozens purely because I was trying to get the time intervals in the first thousand words of this right.
> 
> 5/31/18: minor corrections/typos fixed. thank you for reading!


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